Kimberly Emerson

Talking to people about writing is probably my favorite thing to do. Well, one of my favorite things, but the favorite thing that’s easiest to do on a blog. The others involve either sugar or silk. Or perhaps both. I’ll let you ponder that for a moment.

Writing. I was talking about writing.

Ms. Pepper, me & Ms. Gardner. 100 degrees in the shade and we are still all smiles, thanks to good company and possibly some liquor, if I remember correctly.

In Dallas this summer, at the DFW conference, I did a lot of talking about writing, with many fascinating folks. Two of the most scintillating are the two I already knew and arranged to meet there, M Langlinais Pepper and Erika Gardner. In between the classes and after, we discussed our stories, why we love our genres, and where we get our ideas. Erika was smart. (She usually is.) When she got back, she sat right down and blogged about it. She gets ideas for stories from characters that sneak their way into her head. (You can check it out here. I trust you to come back. Well, maybe leave your car keys with me, just in case. That way, if you get lost on other pages and never read mine again, I’ll have a new car to help me recover from the loss.) Erika writes, she says, because it’s the only way she knows to shut the characters up.

I mentioned this the other night while having dinner with a friend. Scott said it made sense. “Sounds like a writer,” I think he said. I told him it didn’t work like that for me. He asked how my ideas came to me.

Scenes, I told him. Usually a specific line of dialogue that I have to work into the story somewhere.

Scott tried (and failed) not to smile. “Almost like you’re a theatre kid.”

I really hate it when people figure things out about me that I should have figured out first.

Just to be clear, I started writing before I started acting. I wrote stories in elementary school, and to entertain myself on long family car trips. I remember trying to write a play in the sixth grade – something about being asked to masquerade as a seventh grader. In junior high, though, after a failed experiment with band, I found my way into drama class and discovered a part of my soul.

I’m funny about attention. I like it, but only at the right time, in the right way. Fear of making an idiot out of myself stops me from doing a lot of things. The stage does an interesting end run around my nerves. Up there, I am someone else, and I will have no repercussions for things said or done unless I veer from the script (a whole other blog there). In general, though, I follow directions, so that’s not usually a problem. Producing lines on cue and carrying out proper blocking takes a lot of mental energy, requiring you to stay in the moment. Yes, you’ve thought about these lines ahead of time, but what matters right now is the energy you’re getting from your fellow actors and the audience. This moment will never exist again, and you have to live in it to make this show come alive. That heightened sense of reality captivated me.

I put it off as long as I could, but in my late twenties I caved and went to acting school, with help from my very generous brother. For two years, theatre absorbed my every waking moment (some of the sleeping ones, too) as I learned how to do my homework so that come show time, I could play. It changed a lot of things about me, and one of them was the way I write.

I made up exhaustive backgrounds for all my characters when I acted. Start with the clues from the script, and then extrapolate. My poor understudy in The Sound of Music asked me once what I thought happened to my character, Elsa Schrader, after the show ended. It’s only because I graduated from the program that she stopped having to listen to that story. (Elsa made it out of Nazi territory when she figured out they had no fashion sense, ended up in New York, started a makeup company…)

Now, I’m still making up fabulous backgrounds for my characters, but it works the other way around. I have a ton of information, and I have to distill it down to what the reader needs to know. (A skill my understudy probably wishes I had learned sooner.)

But to start, I get a scene. A snippet of dialogue. Not always from the main character. Not always the center of the story. But something that for whatever reason has to be there. This boggles the minds of some of my friends. “What do you mean, you’re trying to figure out how to work in that line? Don’t you think up the dialogue as you go? Why would you have a piece planned already if you didn’t know where it belonged?”

I DON’T KNOW. I didn’t ask for this. That’s just how it comes. A woman says she feels like a freak, and a man tells her, “Everyone feels like a freak down deep.” A woman tells another woman, “You are my best friend, and I don’t let anyone talk about my best friend that way. Not even you.”  I don’t know anything about the scenes or the people except that for some reason it’s a matter of life and death that these things get said.

Then I begin the process of putting together a world where those words must come out.

It’s messy. It’s sort of like painting a room by starting in the middle of the floor. At some point, I will almost certainly end up stuck in a corner with primer on my nose. Eventually, though, the world comes alive, and there I am, right in the thick of it.

If I do my job well, you, the reader, will end up there with me.

Books and plays are alike in a way. Each time, it’s a different experience. You can read the same book five times, but you’re never quite the same person. Depending on what you’ve gone through since the last reading, the story may well have something new to tell the you that is reading it now.

Sometimes, I forget just how lucky I am that I get to do this. Thank you, dear readers, for diving into these heightened moments of mine and sharing them. I hope you enjoy the view.

Kimberly is polishing up another of those worlds, and can’t wait to share it with you.